Key Takeaways
- Crossmedia constructs centralized marketing warehouses for customers in days instead of weeks.
- Crossmedia offers customers reports that combine disparate data sets and reduces its reporting time from a full day to minutes.
- With data centralized in Snowflake, Crossmedia can build client-facing dashboards in Datorama and create custom visualizations and projects in Tableau, empowering clients to work with data.
- Fivetran does the work of two to three engineers.
Data Stack
- Pipeline: Fivetran
- Sources: Campaign Manager, Email, Facebook Ad Account, FTP, Google Ads, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Ad Analytics, AWS S3
- Destination: Snowflake
- BI Tool: Tableau
Crossmedia is a global independent media agency headquartered in NYC. It is not owned by one of the big holding firms like the majority of agencies, and prides itself on being transparent, analytical and integrated.
As data becomes more critical to business decisions, agencies must go beyond advertising and media and integrate with their clients’ data stacks. Clients want timely, relevant and accurate data at their fingertips to measure the effectiveness of their spend. To have a true understanding of ROI and other measurements, however, Crossmedia needed a more effective way to combine data from its clients’ multiple sources, such as CRM, advertising and performance data.
Centralizing Client Data With Fivetran
Crossmedia, like many agencies, uses Datorama as an all-in-one platform for marketing data. However, Datorama connectors are meant for use solely within the platform. "There were three main reasons we needed to bring on Fivetran: easier data integration, quicker access, and the ability to construct more complex data models," explains Kade Killary, Data Scientist at Crossmedia. “We needed a true data warehouse that stored all of our client data, so we brought on Fivetran to get that architecture in place and we haven’t had any problems. Everything with Fivetran has been turn-key.”
Instead of having a full team of engineers maintaining pipelines around the clock, Crossmedia can lean on Fivetran. This is especially critical for setting up additional instances of connectors, as different clients have different data sets and needs. “Data is at the core of everything we do, whether it is dashboarding performance data, segmentation, optimization or prediction," Killary says. "Everything begins and ends with data. Fivetran is pivotal in enabling us to focus our time on advanced analytics without the constant fear of a connection breaking.”
Leveraging Powered by Fivetran to Empower Clients and Employees
With Fivetran, Crossmedia slashed the time it takes to generate a report for clients from a full day to minutes, and it can construct centralized marketing warehouses for customers in days instead of weeks. “From a client perspective, being Powered by Fivetran has 100% made a difference,” says Killary. “The pace of development on data products for clients has grown exponentially.”
Having Fivetran enables Killary and Crossmedia to focus on the agency’s mission rather than engineering: “Our fundamental value proposition to clients isn’t data engineering or data movement,” Killary explains. “The largest component is insights and activation, not engineering pipelines — the value is in what we uncover and how we are able to leverage it. We’re more efficient in allocating our time and resources, enabling us to optimize for what actually drives value for our clients.”
Fivetran has also empowered Crossmedia’s employees. By doing the work of two to three engineers, Fivetran has allowed Crossmedia engineers to work on higher-value tasks and be more hands-on in engineering solutions for clients. With fully managed, zero-maintenance data pipelines, engineers are no longer spending their time constantly fixing bugs and monitoring APIs.
A Warehouse for Agencies
With all of the data in Snowflake, Crossmedia can rapidly integrate larger data sets in a fraction of the time. This was key in solving issues specific to a source that contains billions of rows worth of data. “You can’t easily analyze this data locally, which can make quality assurance a challenge," Killary says. "Once we had our new framework in place, however, there was an immediate return.”
Killary sees many advantages of Snowflake as a warehouse for advertising and marketing purposes: “The fact that Snowflake handles most of the tuning for you is fantastic. We’re empowered to concentrate on the data, as opposed to constantly re-configuring various components of the warehouse. On top of that, features like Time Travel, Data Sharing and Semi-Structured Data Types are all highly applicable to the sort of data challenges that agencies deal with today.”
Presenting Data in Tableau
In addition to offering clients access to a Datorama dashboard environment, Crossmedia uses Tableau to rapidly deliver value by building applications on top of the granular data that Snowflake holds. “With Tableau we’re able to templatize analysis around concepts such as reach and frequency, as well as provide clients with a granular view of their customers’ journeys," says Killary.
If you’re looking to empower your clients and employees with data, leave the pipeline development and maintenance to Fivetran. Sign up for a personalized demo or start your free trial today to learn what it means to be Powered by Fivetran.
About Fivetran: Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology is the smartest, fastest way to replicate your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance cloud warehouse. Fivetran connectors deploy in minutes, require zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes — so your data team can stop worrying about engineering and focus on driving insights.
About Snowflake: Snowflake is the leading data warehouse built for the cloud. Its unique architecture delivers proven breakthroughs in performance, concurrency and simplicity. For the first time, multiple groups can access petabytes of data at the same time, up to 200 times faster and 10 times less expensive than solutions not built for the cloud. Snowflake is a fully managed service with a pay-as-you-go-model that works on structured and semi-structured data.
About Tableau: Tableau helps people see and understand their data. The Tableau platform provides the breadth and depth of capabilities that enterprises need, and adapts to your environment with unmatched flexibility and choice, while meeting the toughest governance and security requirements. People love using Tableau because it is both powerful and intuitive. Tableau leads the industry with the most passionate user community, over 86,000 customer accounts, and a commitment to customer-focused innovation.
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